Over the years, digital video content has gained increasing popularity with consumers. With the increasing amount of audio and video content available to consumers through broadcast, cable, on-demand, fixed media, and other available sources of multimedia content, consumers have access to an increasing amount of content and programming. Furthermore, many devices (e.g., PCs, DVD recorders) and services that are readily available allow consumers to record, time-shift or view on-demand video and audio content.
Video playback systems are well known, and there are a variety of current standards that govern the format and other attributes associated with the various video playback systems. Today, the DVD (Digital Video Disc) standard is the predominant format utilized for optical disc storage because of its high storage capacity, thus enabling high quality video and audio to be stored. Consequently, media content such as movies, television shows, and music videos are made widely available in DVD format.
Blu-ray Disc offers advantages over DVDs and other previous optical standards in various ways including increased storage capacity and enhanced interactivity (disc content authoring, seamless menu navigation, network/Internet connectivity, etc.). The Blu-ray Disc framework offers content providers almost unlimited functionality when creating interactive titles. The author has complete freedom in designing the user interface, which is controllable by using standard navigational buttons on a remote control. As such, Blu-ray Disc provides greater levels of user control and interactivity involving the underlying video content.
Unfortunately, piracy of audio/visual works continues to proliferate as hackers facilitate the unauthorized distribution of multimedia content. Because of the capability in accessing and copying multimedia content stored on DVDs, for example, video and audio piracy continues to be an ongoing problem. Such piracy continues to be a problem even in light of the copy-restricted mechanisms that DVDs generally employ.